maybe it's the weather

Maybe it was the last weekend of summer, but ended up doing many things this weekend that brought into the forefront of my vision the changes happening at so many different levels/layers of my life. I mean I just don't even resonate in the same way anymore.

Of course, Sunday morning in kali class, I was confronted in full force to these things. And I ended up being very emotional in class, which is not so rare of a thing. Even though, by practice, I've learned to, when going for the kill, to be emotionless, kali in and of itself is a very emotional thing. And I've probably cried more time in kali class facing reality than I have cried in pain.

Sunday morning it seemed more confusion than actual physical pain. I felt like I had no real way to communicate to my body. It was all such a foreign language. And a language, that even on a basic level of picking up visual queues, I could not understand.

Tuhan would demonstrate a move, we would watch, he would demonstrate the technique on us, then have us do the technique. And when it was my turn to do the technique, I went completely and utterly blank. And then I came to realize rather quickly that my body felt like it had been rearranged, like when someone else organizes my room, I can't find anything. The passageways I had travelled to make my body move in certain ways had been moved. And so went the morning, where I had to very consciously think about every move I did or was supposed to try to do.

I have been going to acupuncture 1-2 times a week and that had been changing my energy around, but I don't think I realized part of that until today.

I had written before about being lost in your own body. It was like that again today. The emotion seemed more from the confusion of being lost than actual pain to the body. But it wasn't just that, but also layers of fears that didn't have a voice until that moment. The difficulty of fear is that once it creeps in, it is quite hard to get out.

I did what I could throughout the class to keep my mind on other things to keep the full on tears at bay. All of this made for a very exhausting class.

I had to confront the fact that even though I have made various decisive moves regarding enacting changes in my life, that while I desired these things, I also hadn't whole heartedly accepted the changes. There's a difference between saying and doing, wanting and having, trying to be as opposed to actually being.

If there's anything that the fear, uncertainty, lack of confidence, and emotional outpouring was telling me yesterday, was not the struggle of becoming, it was the struggle of accepting. Acceptance has always been the harder thing. To accept that I was no long trying to be anything, but that in fact I already was and it was time to own up to being something. People notice the change in ourselves faster than we ourselves notice the change. While we look into the mirror everyday, we often keep the image of ourselves of who we once were, our last iteration as it were.

That my fear came from this dissonance between who I thought I still was and who I actually am now. As if one part of my brain didn't get the memo, like really really bad jet lag. Once I realized that, then it was a matter of bringing the two realities in sync.

Today, I've been reminding myself to breathe and believe, to take a leap of faith in myself. I am reminded watching my nieces learn to swim, how they had to get over the fear that just because you are not touching the ground or that you are not in someone's arms, it doesn't mean that you are not being supported by something, that you have no other way of holding yourself up. Though, too, it doesn't hurt to ask for a pair of arms once in a while.

I have felt the changes in season so much more powerfully this year than previous ones of my memory. And this, in California, where we're not known for our changes in "season", the seasons seem more than dates on calendars and changes in weather. Perhaps it is the unconscious sensing of all these cues that our ancestors observed and followed.

In the end, I have to accept the person I am in order to focus on what needs to get done.